Ripple (XRP) And Forte Partner To Put $100 Million Into Blockchain-Based Gaming Fund

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Forte, a group working to build blockchain-based gaming platforms, has just revealed its collaboration with Ripple’s (XRP) Xpring “developer incubator initiative”.

Under this partnership, the two will form a $100 million fund to provide for blockchain game developers. Forte will provide the technology and “open-source solutions” while Ripple will bring its experience in cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Collaborating For Improvement

“Blockchain technology has the potential to improve game designs and help developers run better and more successful game economies, but for many developers it’s difficult to develop and deploy,” reads the press release. It continues, “Forte’s platform makes it easy for developers to apply blockchain technology to their games, increasing engagement and monetization with their players. The inaugural fund, managed by Forte, is primarily targeting game developers operating live game economies with over 50,000 daily active users and an interest in using blockchain to unlock support for new game designs and drive business results.

Ripple is working closely with Forte to provide the technology, “namely leveraging the open-source Interledger Protocol” while XRP helps with settlements. Finally, Codius’ smart contract platform will be a “container-based hosting solution,” AKA interoperability. This focus on cross-chain tech will set “the foundation for long-term, sustained consumer adoption of blockchain technology”. The goal here is to make integration as easy as possible for developers.

Forte is a team full of game industry veterans from companies such as Kabam and Unity. They’ve also got backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, co-founder of Coinbase Fred Ehrsam, and more.

“Blockchain technologies’ key innovations unlock vast potential for nearly all forms of digital interaction. Gaming is a $140 billion global industry driven predominantly by digital micro-transaction economies, which we believe will benefit immensely from the integrity and resilience of blockchain technology. The industry needs solutions that can support these economies at scale with cross-chain interoperability.”

Bringing In The People

The games industry is worth around $140 billion as of now. Gaming has grown a ton recently due to innovations such as free-to-play, mobile releases, and other innovative technology. Due to their accessibility, blockchain enthusiasts believe that games will help push the decentralized ledger into the mainstream.

Ethan Beard, Senior Vice President of Xpring, shared his thoughts:

“We are thrilled to partner with such a world class team of game industry veterans. Both Forte and Ripple have a shared belief that blockchain technology will have a massive impact on games, and that providing tools that are easy-to-use, chain agnostic and interoperable is a necessary step in driving scale consumer adoption.”

As of now, the fund is looking for game developers that “meet its criteria”. Devs that run “live game economies with tens of thousands of daily active users” are the target audience.

Brody believes that public cryptocurrencies, for the most, will not appeal to most businesses because they simply add “foreign exchange risk”:.

EY’s Global Innovation Leader says the deployment of distributed ledger tech will be important but relatively slow and unremarkable, Forbes India reports.

As well, Paul R Brody says he does not see much practical use for public cryptocurrencies (“Bitcoin or nearly any other cryptocurrency”) in India, simply because most business is conducted in local currency and cryptocurrencies must generally be converted back to fiat.

The imminent “blockchain revolution” promoted by marketers of ICOs has yet to materialize because “…people have unrealistic expectations about how quickly a technology like blockchain will be adopted,” said Brody:

“Unlike consumer internet applications, enterprise systems are adopted very slowly. Consumers don’t usually spend much time thinking about system integration or security issues and they’re individually empowered to sign up for new services.”

“Enterprises, by contrast, are driven by complex systems integration. Adoption depends on re-thinking processes and integrating systems, and getting comfortable with security considerations. What takes an individual just a couple minutes to adopt a system like Uber or Ola, takes a company months.”

Brody says EY has had positive results in its lab working with private “blockchains,” although some would probably liken what EY is testing to more of a distributed ledger rather than a classic and genuine blockchain.

According to Brody, EY’s private version of “blockchain” allows, “…transactions (that) cost pennies and can be completed in seconds or less. We tested private blockchain systems at our labs at up to 20 million transactions a day, and in some cases, we think we can easily get to 100 million per day in the near future. ”

“One must carefully choose the kinds of business applications to run on blockchain. Even though blockchains are getting faster, they are never going to be cheaper or faster than existing banking payment systems or stock exchange platforms.”

Brody says, “Blockchains excel at handling complex rules that require sharing information across many parties, such as insurance policies or volume purchases and shipping agreements. Traditional banking systems are great at speed, but they do not allow for the parties to include shared business rules in these agreements, for example. The work EY is doing with Microsoft is an excellent example: We are jointly deploying a blockchain solution for digital business contracts, with a focus on software and IP licensing.”

He also believes “blockchains” could be effectively used to counteract counterfeiting and fraud in supply chains:

“Using blockchain technology, we can write smart contracts that make sure companies automatically comply with regulations and pay taxes, all while keeping track of product origin and history with a complete audit trail.”

While blockchains or shared ledger software with cryptographic access may indeed streamline and align aspects of supply chains, critics have also argued that these systems are not “immutable” like public blockchains.

This means that anyone with access to cryptographic keys may be considered a corruptible “point of failure” along the supply chain.

Whether wizardly tech is in place or not, a warehouse foreperson with encrypted key access to a supply chain database, for example, could be bribed to introduce counterfeit goods into the chain.

Still, cryptography may help tighten a supply chain’s access points.

Brody thinks the tech could help medium and smaller businesses enhance supply chain integrity by making the tech cheaper to access:

“In the past, this kind of technology has been too costly for small and medium businesses. With blockchain, I believe it will be possible for medium-sized companies to build sophisticated digital connections with partners and get product-to-market faster, and at a more competitive cost.”

However, he sees no particular use for cryptocurrencies in everyday life:

“I see Bitcoin as just another ‘foreign’ currency—only one without a country. That being said, I see no practical use for Bitcoin or nearly any other cryptocurrency.”

Brody believes that public cryptocurrencies, for the most, will not appeal to most businesses because they simply add “foreign exchange risk”:

“Most people and companies earn their revenue and spend their money in local currency; we believe the future of business transactions on the blockchain are tokenised fiat currencies—basically blockchain-linked dollars, euros, yen, rupees and so on. Transacting on a day-to-day business in a foreign currency just adds foreign exchange risk to all your transactions.”

He also took issue with claims that Bitcoin’s deflationary model is a sound basis for economies:

“Most economists agree that deflation is, in fact, extremely bad for economies. Inflation, particularly out of control hyper-inflation, has not been a real risk in mature economies for decades, so widespread adoption of Bitcoin could be very damaging to the global economy.”

The MIT Bitcoin Club had held the 6th Annual Expo to be held on March 9th and 10th, 2019 at MIT. Peter Todd, a prominent Bitcoin Core Engineer spoke about Bitcoin being an effective smart contract platform.

He talked about other EOS and other smart contracting platforms that are permissionless in nature. Todd notes that most of these smart contracting platforms use only mediocre technology.

He stated:

“Bitcoin, in production, is the most successful smart contract platform because it is very simple. Because it relies on very simple things and very clearly which actually works. I talk with smart smart contracts have extensionally legal contracts but the important thing is to have a contract which you can enforce with technology.”

Smart contracts are computer programs stored in a blockchain. They can be used to automate the unstoppable transfer of crypto-tokens between users, according to agreed-upon conditions. The Bitcoin protocol can be used to create smart contracts. Bitcoin provides the ideal mix of smart contract functionality — enough to make smart contracts easy to implement but without the security and privacy risks of a more complicated platform like Ethereum.

As the Bitcoin protocol has evolved, it has gained support for smart contracts. Smart contract functionality is not as programmable and extensible on Bitcoin as it is on Ethereum. However, using features added to Bitcoin through improvement proposals, certain smart contract functionality can be achieved through Bitcoin scripting.

There are many dozens of Bitcoin-based blockchain projects out there, but most are simply building cryptocurrencies forked from Bitcoin. They’re not taking advantage of Bitcoin’s potential to create the foundation for a completely decentralized platform that supports a multitude of DApps and programmable functionality.

Further, Todd added that it did not necessarily mean that the programming code used had to be complex to be effective citing Bitcoin Lightning network as an example.

NEO is one of the most popular blockchain networks in the market and also a leading smart contract platform. The team behind NEO implemented the …

Was The NEO Blockchain Down For An Hour As Reddit Reports Show?

There are some reports that spread on Reddit regarding the NEO network having some issues with its block production. As per the Reddit user Zzzoem, the NEO blockchain was down for over an hour. As he mentioned, there are some decentralized applications such as Switcheo that cannot work when there are no new transactions. What happened with NEO’s network?

Was The NEO Network Down?

According to the redditor, NEO’s block #3467252 took over 152 minutes to be produced. There have been several individuals calling the whole project a scam and speculated about the reasons behind this situation.

NEO is one of the most popular blockchain networks in the market and also a leading smart contract platform. The team behind NEO implemented the Byzantine Fault-tolerant (dBFT) consensus mechanism and adopted a dual-token economy, compared to other projects.

Another Redditor decided to answer and explain why the block production was delayed. The Redditor explained that the NEO consensus mechanism works in a different way than other networks. As he mentioned, NEO follows an exponential block protocol.

About it, the Redditor called drei1 explained:

“NEO follows an exponential back off protocol. This means that if it cannot achieve consensus in 15 seconds, it will try to achieve it in 30 seconds. If it cannot achieve it in 1 minute, it will try to achieve it in 2 minutes, and so on. Each time it doubles the time is called a “View Change.”

As he said, the blockchain is not down, however, it is following a completely reasonable exponential backoff. Drei1 went on explaining that there are some changes being developed that aim at reducing the amount of Change View.

NEO is currently the 17th most valuable digital asset in the market. Each coin can be purchased for $8.93 and it has a market capitalization of $580 million.

That the gaming industry is lucrative but fragmented is true. With an ever-expanding base clocking 2.3 billion in 2018, gamers all over the world were projected to spend a whopping $137.9 billion by end of Q4 2018 according to reliable data from the games market intelligence company Newzoo.

The mouth-watering figure represents a 13.3 percent year over year gain of which approximately $70 billion flew in from mobile phone revenues which jumped 25.5 percent over the same time-frame. Interestingly, the global games revenue is expected to spike by another double digit figure, 10.3 percent, to $180.1 billion by 2021.

Therefore, for Ripple through its investment wing Xpring to partner with Forte and commit a $100 million fun dedicated specifically for developers keen on venturing, developing and launching blockchain-based games is a step in the right direction if not a show of their long term intentions. It is also a blatant demonstration that blockchain as a disruptive technology has the capacity to drastically cause a shift in any form of digital interaction.

Ripple’s Xpring and Forte $100 Million Fund

Forte, a blockchain platform where developers can launch new games or where existing games can be imported to, was created by a gaming veteran, Kevin Chou and together with Brett Seyler, their company has received funding from industry luminaries and seasoned venture capitalists including Andreesen Horowitz, Canaan Partners, CoinBase Ventures, Battery Ventures and others. In an interview, Ethan Beard, the head of Xpring said:

“We are thrilled to partner with such a world class team of game industry veterans. Both Forte and Ripple have a shared belief that blockchain technology will have a massive impact on games, and that providing tools that are easy-to-use, chain agnostic and interoperable is a necessary step in driving scale consumer adoption.”

Forte will heavily rely on Ripple technologies and will ride on their fast and transparent ledger as they help game developers create a better ecosystem where blockchain technology can be effective in improving game deigns while simultaneously increasing engagement thereby increasing revenue streams for ardent gamers.

Aside from the base layer, Forte will also make use of Ripple’s ILP where XRP will be used for settlement and Codius for seamless cross chain smart contracting purposes. To kick-start their project, Forte will be aiming at developers with more than 50,000 users willing to migrate from centralized to a decentralized operating environment.

While confirming, Allen Ma, the Vice president of partnerships at Forte, said:

“We’re excited to connect with developers who are running live game economies with tens of thousands of daily active users or more and have an active interest in using blockchain technology to improve their business.”

Tron Arcade

It must be remembered that the announcement comes roughly three months after Tron launched the Tron Arcade. With $100 million spread across three years, the fund would help in building a robust blockchain game ecosystem based off the Tron blockchain. Like Forte’s objective, Tron Arcade would directly empower developers as they create and innovate on new ideas while launching new games contributing towards an autonomous ecosystem as a strong and supportive community is built.

Disclaimer: This article is not meant to give financial advice. Any additional opinion herein is purely the author’s and does not represent the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its other writers. Please carry out your own research before investing in any of the numerous cryptocurrencies available. Thank you.